SEO Tip of the Day for Sunday, April 11, 2010 - Deep Links Looks Natural

Organically acquired links tend to point to pages other than a home page, so when you are creating what our Super Mod ~CReed calls “self service” links – article placement, blog commenting, and yes, forum posting -- you probably want to target as many of your internal pages as is logical to do. It's called "deep linking" and some SEOs even analyze the deep link ratio of a site. See SEO Book's post on the DLR.

While I personally think that’s extreme, it does look more natural to the SEOs if you have more incoming links to internal pages than links to the home page. When you get an organic link from a site, it's not usually to your home page, is it? More often it links directly to a resource or tool that someone else found helpful. Effective link building must mimic the natural patterns.

SEO Tip of the Day for Monday, April 12, 2010 - Has The Neighborood Changed?

Check Your Outgoing Links – Has The Neighborhood Changed?

You might have software to check whether outgoing links reach a page rather than a 404, but you should check them regularly to make sure you are still linking to the same information. Maybe you liked a tool and it’s been moved – or doesn’t work any more. Or they have a better one on a different page. Maybe the site has been sold and it redirects. Gotta check.

It’s also important to make sure they are still “good neighborhoods.” If you have exchanged links in the past, it’s a good idea to make sure the sites you link to are still of a quality you are proud to recommend. You are giving a vote of confidence to that site. Check their outgoing links, too. They should not be linking to sites that violate search engine guidelines. If you link to “bad neighborhoods” Google will penalize or even remove your site from the directory. Not sure what a bad neighborhood is: check this post.

Here’s not one tip, but 20 Hard Core SEO Tips in a post by SEO Theorist Michael Martinez. This one caught my eye:

Quote:

Create a forum signature that does not promote your Web site. Put it into every forum profile you have created. Why? Because it makes you look confident, professional, and less like a shlocky self-promotional shmuck who doesn’t know what forums are for. More importantly, it will teach you to write compelling content (think of those 25-word advertisements I mentioned above).

Check their outgoing links, too. They should not be linking to sites that violate search engine guidelines. If you link to “bad neighborhoods” Google will penalize or even remove your site from the directory. Not sure what a bad neighborhood is: check this post.

Here's my tip to help save you time when checking the outbound links on sites that you link to. Use Bing's Search Operator linkfromdomain to see who they are linking to:

SEO Tip of the Day for Thursday, April 15, 2010 - Tracking Your Success

How do you track your SEO success? Is PageRank the feather in your cap? Are you tracking positions in the SERPs? Has personalized search wrecked your strategy for tracking success? What you should be tracking is traffic, at the very least, and conversions is an even better benchmark of your effectiveness in optimizing a website.

If you’ve been doing SEO for a while, you probably name your images with keywords and add alt attributes. But you could be getting more traffic from Google Image Search - and from regular SERPs as well if you optimized your images a little further. Images, to be accessible, should have title tags, as well, and both alt and title attributes should be written with the reader in mind – the text should flow as well as contain your keywords. An advanced SEO technique is to use long tailed phrases to name your files. This is especially effective when your images are products that have variations. For example, red-brand-name-widgets.jpg. Some additional suggestions for optimizing images: http://foliovision.com/2008/03/26/seo-google-images.

SEO Tip of the Day for Saturday, April 17, 2010 - Optimizing A Searchable Database

If you have a searchable database that generates unique urls, then use those unique urls to create a sitemap of the database. You can then look at the way the site presents the searches and optimise the pages accordingly. You should also use mod rewrites on the urls to make them search friendly. If the search engines can't do the search themselves, do it for them and show them the info.

Just for today, take the day off from what ~Creed terms “self service” links (forum posts, blog commenting, article writing, et al) and shift your focus. Today, add fresh content to your website. Think of it as spider food. Think of it as inviting Google to visit more often. Think of it as a way to add more keywords and long tailed phrases to your site. Think of it as making your site more attractive to users. Think of it as bowing to royalty, as in Content is King. Think of it as the most effective way to do SEO. Think it as what you want to do tomorrow, too.

SEO Tip of the Day for Tuesday, April 20, 2010 - Hunting the Long Tailed KWDs

Hunting Down the Long Tailed Keyword Phrase

If you aren’t getting the SERPs, the traffic or the conversions you want, you might be targeting a phrase that’s too general and too competitive. For a newer site it’s much easier and more effective to target a longer phrase and once you have that, concentrate on the more competitive term. For those who are optimizing internal pages for long tailed terms, Wordtracker’s free keyword tool http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ has a "drill down" that allows you to easily search (no cut and paste) for even longer variations on a phrase you'd like to target. Of course, if you are getting good results with a shorter phrase, the longer ones are even more targeted. Users who use four or more words in a search tend to know exactly what they want and are more likely to be ready to buy than those using fewer words in a query.

SEO Tip of the Day for Wednesday, April 21, 2010 - Want A Link, Just Ask

If you have a website, you get those emails asking for a link exchange from unknown webmasters all the time. If you’re like me, you probably toss them in the virtual waste basket. But I agreed to give one away today because someone I know (and like) asked. So, what’s the right way to ask? How about in person or on the phone? Have you asked all your friends? Your business associates? Chamber of Commerce acquaintances? Your clients? Some of their sites might not be relevant, but if your business is focused in your hometown and your contact’s is, too, that relevant geographically. Maybe you sell real estate and you have happy buyers or sellers – call them up or better yet, take them to lunch and ask for that link. Another way to ask for a link is to put it on every page. For example: Do you find these tips helpful?

Please link to this thread: <a href=”http://www.v7n.com/forums/seo-forum/177207-learn-something-new-every-day-v7ns-seo-tip-day.html"> SEO Tip of the Day on V7N Forum</a>

Some contribution from effdate
Always prepare yourself with a list of keywords all related to your niche. I usually keep that in a simple text file which I can refer to. You will be amazed on how long the list can stretch and how useful it can be if you are working on your link building and article marketing

Pay attention to related words. Google analyzes your page not only by the actual keywords but by the words related to it (Know as Latent Semantic indexing a version of which Google has confirmed they use).

I'm impressed Mjtaylor. I thought for sure my contribution would be to analyze the first page search results of a keyword phrase for quantity and quality of backlinks but you beat me to it.

SEO Tip of the Day for Saturday, April 24, 2010 - Preventing Canonical Issues

Make sure you don’t have any canonicalization issues – whether you use www or not as part of your URL. Choose which you want to use and 301 redirect the other to it. For example, if you choose http://www.domain.com, then http://domain.com should redirect to it.

SEO Tip of the Day for Sunday, April 25, 2010 - Internal Links to the Home Page

Where Are Your Home Page Links Going?

Are you splitting your own PageRank? Look at all the links in your site pointing to the home page. Are you linking to both http://www.YourDomain.com/index.html and http://www.YourDomain.com? To a search engine spider those are different URLs and therefore, different pages. Presumably, you are distributing internal PageRank to more than one page when you mean to send if back to the home page. Drop those and make them all point to http://www.YourDomain.com - just the domain, no index.html or index. php, etc in the URL.

SEO Tip of the Day for Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - Give Up The FOOLishness

Stop Wasting your Time on FoolBar, I mean Toolbar, PageRank

We all know that lower Foolbar (sic) PageRank sites often beat higher Foolbar PR sites in SERPs, so why not take a month off from chasing something that doesn’t even correlate with success? Instead, put your focus on something that you know counts: relevance. Seek links from sites you like for their own sake and the relevance to the content of your own. While you’re at it, you might stop worrying about whether links are followed. Go ahead and comment on blogs to your heart’s content, join new directories, post in forums, and exchange links but do it without looking at the FOOLbar. Decide which sites are worth your time based on the relevance and quality. Try this for one month and send me a note to tell me how it worked out, please.

SEO Tip of the Day for Wednesday, April 28, 2010 - Directory Strategies

Submitting to directories has lost some of its luster – more and more SEOs feel it’s not really worth the time, but directory listings can be a valuable part of a link campaign and a good source of traffic. Forget automated submissions of any sort, and don’t farm this out. You want to apply to directories that match the quality of your site and that are relevant. Seek out niche directories that could drive traffic. Do vary your anchor text and your description, and try to get links to internal sites (aka deeplinks) wherever you can. Seek human edited directories - they may have review fees, but that doesn't make them "paid links" if they are human edited.

SEO Tip of the Day for Thursday, April 29, 2010 - Traffic From All Directions

Don’t limit your traffic analysis to one program. Google Analytics is free and robust, and is great addition to your arsenal, but you probably want more than one way to analyze your traffic. Many hosts provide some sort of free program, such as AWStats to display your web statistics – and you can also learn to read the log files, and do your own analysis. Even Alexa – which has plenty of detractors to decry its accuracy – may have something to show you about your site. Analysis across several platforms may highlight a trend you wouldn’t have seen otherwise, and the use of Alexa may uncover something about your competition that you didn’t realize.

Here’s an example. Recently I was trying to explain to a client that the SERPs aren't what matters - traffic is. His site makes the top 5 for most of his competitive terms, but there is one other site that is always ahead – usually #1, and he longs to best their position. I was looking at his Alexa position and decided to check his rival. Guess what? Despite their apparent lead in the SERPs their traffic is reportedly, significantly lower than my client's. Case closed.

In SCUBA, divers are taught this safety slogan: Plan Your Dive, Dive Your Plan. It helps to ensure you’ll surface where you want to be – close to the boat. Applied to SEO, that would suggest if you plan and follow a strategy for optimizing your website, you are likely to surface somewhere toward the top of the SERPs.

Set goals – what search position for your chosen terms will you target, quantify the traffic, leads and sales you expect, profile your market, outline what content you will add on what schedule; set a strategy for “self service” links – forum participation, article writing, directory submission, et al. When you have your plan, work it. Set aside time every day to implement your strategy – all day if you’re an SEO – or at least an hour or two if you are promoting your own site. The more structured your plan, the more clearly outlined and scheduled your implementation, the more likely your success. Go for it: Plan Your SEO, SEO Your Plan!